SEE STORY PAGES 2

FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM OCTOBER 21 - 27, 2021 | PAGE 3

Scramble Offers Unique Play for Kids of All Ages

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America.

After returning home, he began developing a business plan answering the question “why doesn’t this style of play center exist in the states?”

Scramble in Alexandria was the first play center of its kind in America and Scramble in Falls Church is the largest, with a building built from scratch with the purpose of becoming a play center in mind.

The Falls Church location opened in August in a new building built by the Young Group, which has a long-term lease on the land from the Falls Church Episcopal Church across the street, with the health and safety of guests as a top priority. Thirty percent of the air in the building is always fresh air from outside. An electrostatic sprayer is used to disinfect surfaces, the chemical used is CDC approved, killing Covid within 10 minutes of the initial spray and stays on surfaces for 72 hours. Masks are required for unvaccinated guests but are allowed to be removed when playing if allowed by the caretaker in accordance with local health regulations.

In addition to regular play hours each day of the week, Scramble also offers an after school camp program Monday through Friday until 6:30 p.m. including early release days and teacher professional days. Freshly made snacks are provided to each child and time is made both for play and homework, including a private room to complete work without distraction.

The theme of the play center is “water, land, air and space,” starting with water on the bottom level of the main frame and scenes of Hawaii in the sensory area. As you move up the main frame, the scenes around you change.

For older children, bits of educational information are scattered throughout the main frame with topics such as Christopher Columbus, westward expansion and climate change.

“I don’t know whether a child playing here will in any way absorb the idea that they’re even on sea, land, air or space,” said Smallman. “But they may get a sense of some of these things because the brain will file it away.”

An additional feature unique to Scramble is the inclusion of a bookstore. The bookstore is located right in the entrance of the building and is one of the largest suppliers of Usborne Books, a British publishing house, on the east coast. There are books available corresponding with the wide age range of children visiting the play center and are all educational while still being interactive and fun to read and look at.

Smallman believes that play is innate to humans and important for development. He is incredibly passionate about creating a unique play experience that both children and their caretakers will want to return to.

“Over time, if you were growing up with this system, I wouldn’t have to explain to you how valuable cognitive play is, you would notice,” says Smallman. “And I’ve had parents say to me ‘oh, my child is far more or he explores more on his own. You know, we, um, instead of now encouraging him, we just have to, we have to watch out and hold it back.’ And of course, some of that could be anecdotal. Some of it could be, that’s just how children develop at an age. And of course you can’t differentiate the two, except that there’s a huge amount of research that shows that the more we play and the better the quality of the play, the more we develop. And it is obvious if play’s developmental,

THE MAIN FRAME of the play center goes up four levels and features sea, land, air and space themes. (P����: N���-P����)

it is then that the more we play, the more development we’re going to do, the better, quality of the play, the better, the nature of that development.” Scramble is located at 130 E. Fairfax St. adjacent the Southgate Village Shoppes. To find out more about Scramble and book a visit, check out their website at https:// goscramble.com/.

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PAGE 4 | OCTOBER 21 - 27, 2021

LOCAL

FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM

City Staff Members Leave Amongst Discussion of Allocation of Funds

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back from the City’s Employee Advisory Committee and others has met the notion of a tax rebate, the News-Press has learned.

Last Monday’s weekly virtual meeting of key City department heads was met with firm resistance to the idea of giving surplus money back to taxpayers when it could be argued that the surplus was obtained at the expense of the extra labor of existing employees.

Shields noted that two more members of the F.C.Police Department have announced they are leaving for more lucrative options in adjacent jurisdictions. That has raised the question of what Falls Church needs to do not only to be fair to its employees, but to remain competitive in salaries and benefits with other jurisdictions in the region in order to retain employees.

“When Fairfax and Arlington have a shortage, they know to come looking to Falls Church,” said one City employee, because they know they can be enticed away with better compensation.

What remains unspecified is how the current labor shortage is impacting the Falls Church quality of life for its residents. Shortages at the Police Department, and how that may be placing citizens in jeopardy, are more than matched by shortages in Public Works, for example, which are responsible for everything from leaf removal to unclogging sewers and fixing broken roads and sidewalks.

“This shortage is part of a national pattern,” Shields said. In Falls Church, it began with a hiring freeze instigated at the onset of the pandemic, and has continued. Now, he says, “We are working hard to fill the 25-30 positions [out of some 200 full time City positions--ed.] we are down. We are clawing back but are finding it difficult to hire. But our situation is not unique.”

Key employees at City Hall, however, insist that Falls Church is unique, indeed. It is from the standpoint of the services demanded in a locality like Northern Virginia as compared to more rural areas. Even in the case of the nearby Town of Vienna, it was noted, it has the same number of full time employees to engage in some kinds of work that require half the effort because the burden is on Fairfax County to offer the service.

People earning $50,000 are being offered $70,000 by Fairfax for the same or even less work, one source noted.

When a compensation study was finally done for one category of work, it was learned that the City, indeed, was paying considerably less than the going rate regionally, and that led to across the board salary hikes in that department.

Some are now saying that a compensation study for the entire City workforce needs to be done. Not all, or even many, on the City Council, have expressed support for a tax rebate, Vice Mayor Marybeth Connelly wrote the News-Press following Monday’s meeting:

“Just in case I wasn’t clear enough from the dais, I want to use to the FY2021 surplus, which consists of underspending and revenue surplus, to meet the needs that the City has in serving its taxpayers. We’ve constrained budgets for several years due to the pandemic, and while things are looking up, we aren’t out of the woods yet.”

She added, “Many departments need staff and resources to serve citizens, and I think that’s the best use of surplus, not a tax rebate or refund. It gives me hope that we may be able to lower the [real estate tax] rate further next year, but due to the unstable nature of the economy right now, I am not in favor of the plan [for a tax rebate that Councilman Phil] Duncan set forth.”

Duncan’s proposal was to use $1.37 million of the budget surplus for a tax rebate of 3 cents (per $100 assessed valuation), arguing “that would still leave enough to do a lot of catch-up work on things the City and the schools scrimped on when we were in the deepest pandemic gloom.”

As for the $18 million in federal ARPA dollars, Shields said that terms for its use are restrictive, that the funds can’t be used to increase salaries and that only “premium pay” can be allotted, which he says is a fancy term for bonuses. But bonuses, per se, are not allowed, either.

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FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM

LOCAL

PAGE 5 | OCTOBER 21 - 27, 2021

City Council Candidates Participate In Only In-Person Debate This Election Cycle

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ordinary businessman and family man, and to the extent that temporarily boosted his standing in the polls, that advantage against Democratic former governor Terry McAuliffe began to crumble thanks to Trump’s personal intervention on his behalf in the race. That happened at a Steve Bannon-run political rally in Richmond last week where Trump called into the event to offer his heartfelt endorsement of Youngkin, assuring the faithful there that Youngkin would do everything Trump wants.

Youngkin hopes his Trumpian campaign will also lift more Republican novices, equally radical candidates for attorney general and lieutenant governor, over seasoned and solid Democratic veterans, incumbent attorney general Mark Herring and state delegate Hala Ayala.

Due to the extraordinary circumstances of this first post-Trump year, there is no way that Falls Church’s local elections for City Council and School Board can be seen as simply local. They all are surrounded by the taint of national politics.

In that context, perhaps the most important of the sequence of local candidate forums this month is coming tonight, when the F.C. Citizens for a Better City (CBC) hosts a virtual event involving the seven candidates running to fill four vacant School Board seats. The debate begins at 7:30 p.m., and the link can be found on the CBC website.

Why is a School Board race so important in the grander scheme of things?

First, one need look no further than Falls Church’s neighboring Fairfax and Loudoun counties, where angry and violent behavior has forced the shutting down of more than one school board meeting as Trumpian right wingers have disrupted proceedings with whacked out claims of conspiracies and “critical race theory” untruths exposing a racist underbelly to some of the protests. This is exactly the Trumpian formula for chaos.

Second, in the case of Falls Church’s race itself, there is a candidate in the running who has brought in over $30,000 in outside money after launching his campaign with a column in the Wall Street Journal that ignored the local nature of the race and its issues, and included disparaging comments about the awardwinning Falls Church schools. The candidate, Ilya Shapiro, is a top level operative in the D.C.-based rightwing think tank, the Cato Institute.

Other candidates have played big roles in the attempts to stir up citizen dissent in the City over the School Board’s handling of the extremely challenging Covid-19 pandemic crisis, and attempting to rally opposition to the School Board’s courageous effort to bring the City in line with the national anti-racist movement by electing to change the name of two City schools away from early leaders of the nation who stood for democracy but unapologetically owned many slaves.

Voter discernment in this race, with its seven candidates and no incumbents, is vital and Falls Church citizens have a penchant for smart decision making. To the extent some can’t make up their minds, tonight’s forum will help and, minus that, the News-Press will reiterate its final, updated endorsements for the City Council and School Board on its editorial page next week. Two forums highlighting the City Council race in the last week proved particularly helpful in drawing out the strengths and aspirations of the six candidates seeking the four open seats.

One, the first of the two online events hosted by the CBC, was made particularly useful by the moderator role assumed by young Falls Church native Pete Davis, Harvard Law School graduate, co-founder of the Democracy Network, and author of the new book, “Dedicated, The Case for Commitment in An Age of Browsing.” Davis kept the candidates on topic and within their allotted times to respond. The second was the first inperson forum event of the campaign hosted by the Falls Church Chamber of Commerce at an outdoor venue, the backyard lunch facility of Dominion Wine and Beer.

There, the candidates got to see each other in person all in one place for the first time and with the Chamber’s Andrew Painter as the moderator, they all made forceful cases for their candidacies and achievements of the current board, with a partial emphasis on business development issues of special interest to the Chamber.

The three incumbents in the race, Vice Mayor Marybeth Connelly, David Snyder and Deborah SchantzHiscott, despite their wide disparities in years of service (Snyder since 1994, Connelly seeking a third term and Hiscott winning a special election), laid out the considerable achievements of the current Council solidly, and challengers Caroline Lian, Stuart Whitaker and Scott Diaz all acquitted themselves effectively.

An evidence of the interrelationship between Trumpian priorities of Youngkin, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, and the local races here is reflected in the comment made to the News-Press by veteran Councilman and candidate for re-election to a seventh four-year term David Snyder, reflecting on Youngkin’s “threat to cut state school funds to jurisdictions who would remove the role of School Resource officers.”

While he favors keeping the officers “as safety threats regrettably have not dissipated,” Youngkin’s threat “clearly indicated a future return to bureaucratic command and control from Richmond,” Snyder wrote. “We don’t need Richmond to dictate what is right for our community or our schools.”

All expected to participate in the School Board debate tonight are all seeking public office for the first time: Shapiro, Lori Silverman, Jerrod Anderson, Courtney Mooney, David Ortiz, Kathleen Tysse and Tate Gould.